The Sims 4 preview: There goes the neighborhood

More hangout spaces, better personalities breathe fresh life into The Sims.

Barack Obama's appearance in early Sims 4 promo shots would be a lot better with the game's eventual "limbo" expansion pack.

In some ways, The Sims peaked early as a dollhouse franchise. From the beginning, players could create a Sim, trap it in a tiny cage of walls, and watch it die in a mess of its own starving filth. Really, how much higher could Wil Wright’s quirky creation-station reach from there?

Further Reading

Other countries say Sims games are appropriate for kids as young as 6.

It’s a weird example of Sims brutality, but it’s also an old-hat example of the series after so many years, which leads us to the feeling we’ve had for too long: Sims games have been stuck in old mechanics. Instead of broadening the gameplay in significant ways, The Sims has mostly expanded over the years by way of endless, optional content packs—decorations, pets, Katy Perry hairstyles, etc.

That’s all catnip for diehard fans, but anybody who has fallen out of Sims favor has been waiting for something along the lines of The Sims 4, which seeks to shake up the series’ core without disrupting its addictive qualities. In some ways, this iteration steps closer to the personality-centric dollhouse stuff you’d expect from a rival like Nintendo.

During last week’s E3, we sat in on a few gameplay sessions from Sims 4 producers, where we heard the repeated claim that “we’ve made Sims three-dimensional… on the inside.” In spite of the cheesy phrase, however, the game’s robust character creator makes us wonder what took EA and Maxis so long to make something like this, doling out equally robust sliders for faces and character interests.

Taking a whiz

After making solid-looking cartoony versions of themselves, complete with personality-linked aesthetic choices like how they walk, Sims 4 staffers went to trait town. Each character opens with a number of choices that flesh out its general attitude, including aspirations, hobbies, emotions, lifestyle, and social style.

These don’t merely adjust when happy and frowny icons appear; one character’s “computer whiz” aspiration will dole out a personality bonus if a goal is achieved, and a corresponding trait for being computer-savvy will lead her to that goal, whether while working or just being social. Another character’s proclivity towards fitness and being a “bro” put him in an angry state more often, which producers put to a more positive use by having him do push-ups and hard-labor chores.

From there, familiar Sims play emerges: Build a house, pay attention to your residents’ needs, then watch disparate people come together and develop every range of relationship, from friendship to love to hate.

Enlarge/ This neighborhood shot in The Sims 4 shows a little bit of the game's giant park, but we were more interested in new, lively setpieces like nightclubs and gyms.

Where the new range of emotional reactions and emotion-specific interactions comes to life is in The Sims 4’s out-of-house locations, which let you follow your characters around a bustling world. A computer whiz will have more happy opportunities at a computer-filled café, while an angry bro will build a lot of positive stats, both in fitness and sense of accomplishment, at the game’s giant gym.

Other locations include piano bars, libraries, nightclubs, and a dense, activity-loaded park that appears to be the game’s public hub, where your personal Sims will meet pre-made characters with wildly varied interests. If you want to take care of your Sims without venturing afar, you’ll be able to build the house of their dreams and leave them be, but jumping from locale to locale is easy enough and leads to location-specific scouring for materials (plants, free decorations) and activities. This change appears to have been liberally lifted from the likes of Animal Crossing, and good on EA for this welcome theft.

Careful with the cupcakes, Kim!

What’s more, unlike the always-online debacle of the recent SimCity reboot, The Sims 4 won’t require an Internet connection or collaboration with other players. The virtual game world may have expanded with cool Sim-play possibilities—like befriending an Elton John lookalike at a piano bar or getting workout advice from a Chuck Norris lookalike at the gym—but it remains each player’s own personal zone of madness.

That’s not to say there isn’t a welcome Internet option this time. Past Sims games have included out-of-game content browsing capabilities, which required digging through annoying Web interfaces to find community creations. That annoyance has been thankfully rectified, as characters and homes alike can be found in The Sims 4’s in-game browser, which comes up with a simple click during live play. In the case of homes, players can even chop out specific rooms or portions from a pre-made house to insert into their own home, along with a “furnished” toggle if players don’t care to import associated furniture.

From there, your rooms old and new can be dragged-and-dropped with a slick wireframe visual effect, while walls and ceilings can be dragged around on the fly to make rooms bigger or smaller without having to commit to total rebuild processes.

Much of the demo felt a little too choreographed, of course. For example, producers caused chaos during a house party by way of lousy roommate Kim Jong Un, who set the kitchen’s cupcake maker on fire just when Chuck Norris was about to show off his dance moves. We can’t imagine every bar visit, house party, and library stop being that action packed in an average Sims 4 session. That being said, the new elements on display felt like perfect, sensible additions to the long-addictive Sims formula. Frankly, we were surprised to leave the demos awaiting the game’s September 2 launch on PC.

I'm somewhat looking forward to this version; that character creation bit looks bloody awesome. Glad to see they're handling online functions as a completely optional thing. Hopefully they'll streamline the Memories so they either automatically time out as space fills up, or make it easier to manage them for bulk deletion. (Do I really need a screenshot and scrapbook bit never time a tree grows?)

I hope, in utter futility, this won't become another paid-DLC-apalooza. I entered The Sims 3 only about a year ago when there was some deal on Origin with an expansion pack, so I feel I got my money's worth there, but just scrolling through all the expansion packs fills me with a bit of disgust at how much there is, and the prices of all of it.

The in-game store of 3 made me think of Steam's hat store, with absurdly priced knicknacks and doohickies. I'm certain there are people who love that kind of thing, but I'm kind of glad I never felt like I needed any of it.

It will, of course, be the way EA "breaks" Sims 4... gobs and gobs of paid content.

Has anyone figured what the "total cost of ownership" would be for The Sims 3? Like... if you bought *everything*?

Steam Summer sale puts the game at 10, with all the DLC for 214. Since that's at a 50% discount, total price is now around 450 for the base game and 19 DLC packs.I didn't see the Katy Perry pack on Steam; some others are also missing. Briefly checking out Origin I counted (poorly) another 6 packs or so. Assuming I suck at acounting, that might be another $200 on Origin.

More looking... Katy Perry was discontinued a year ago. (I'm being deliberately ambiguous here.)

What’s more, unlike the always-online debacle of the recent SimCity reboot, The Sims 4 won’t require an Internet connection or collaboration with other players.

My take is that the prospect of milking hundreds of dollars-worth of DLC content off consumers + fears of poisoning those wallets with connection crashes is the reason. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's just a one-time activation and then the option of offline play.

In any case, how does it compare with another life sim such as Tomodachi Life? I mean, you can worship Satan in that game.

From there, familiar Sims play emerges: Build a house, pay attention to your residents’ needs, then watch disparate people come together and develop every range of relationship, from friendship to love to hate.

From there, familiar Sims play emerges: Build a house, pay attention to your residents’ needs, then watch disparate people come together and develop every range of relationship, from friendship to love to hate.

So basically a virtual sitcom?

That's actually a pretty good way of putting it. A sitcom where one of your guys might be stolen by aliens one night, only to be dumped back out a few hours later, with no memory of what happened...

So how much will this game depend on EA's servers for "offloaded computation to improve the game experience" and will you need to make £50 worth of micropayments to build a home bigger than a broom cupboard?

As cool as this sounds, I'm going to stick with my usual Sims strategy of waiting till at least two major expansions are released before buying

That has the added benefit of reducing the price of entry. I don't think I've paid full price for anything in this franchise.

That said, peak stability for Sims3 was somewhere in the middle of the expansions. The game engine is dreadfully unstable at this late point. I gave up on it a while back after I completely lost a game to savefile corruption.

That exterior shot looks like the SimCity GlassBox engine. So presumably you'll be limited to a very small plot and your Sims will go home to a different house every night on the odd occasion they aren't stuck in bugged traffic jams?

I hadn't heard of this, so I looked (very briefly) into it, and it looks like a completely different thing from The Sims; it looks more like Second Life. It *appears* to have one avatar directly controlled per player, as opposed to the semi-independent masses allowed by The Sims.

I'd prefer to play god over a tiny universe and keep all the other pantheons at bay.

(If I misunderstood OpenSim, I'd be interested in a better explanation.)

As cool as this sounds, I'm going to stick with my usual Sims strategy of waiting till at least two major expansions are released before buying

The expansions are precisely why EA loves the Sims franchise and why I haven't bought it since the original (not counting The Sims Medieval, which I loved). The day they put together a "complete" edition for a reasonable price is the day they get my money. I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for the expansions and nickel and dime DLC for a semi-complete experience.

Thank you, EA, but no. I was totally into Sims 1, loved Sims 2 to pieces, then started playing Sims 3 when it came out. For years I've worked off and on on building a TS3 world only to end up with problems every time an expansion pack was released because I could either update my game and play it OR keep my game and the world creation tool in working order, rarely ever both at the same time. Then there were the bugs, the incessant bugs that EA NEVER fixes so instead of spending time playing I'd be spending hours on end updating with player-made fixes in order to have a semi-working game. I had gone through similar with Sims 2, although not quite as badly, and I hadn't planned on attempting Sims 3 but decided to give it a shot. So currently I haven't played Sims 3 in over two years, still wouldn't mind getting back to finishing that world but can't quite convince myself to do it, and have two or three expansion packs sitting on a shelf I've never even installed.

EA appears to be made up of a bunch of money-grubbing execs that couldn't care less about delivering a reasonably working (never mind quality) product and don't have to because so many people will line up to buy anything with The Sims in the title it's ridiculous. As long as that cash cow can be milked I don't believe they give one hoot about the horrid mastitis infection said poor cow has.

EA can keep Sims 4 and I'll keep my money, thank you very much. There are much worthier causes for it than buying what will indubitably be yet another over-hyped bug-infested piece of garbage masquerading as a video game.

Already did, there is no way Kim Jong UN ruins Chuck Norris fun without being destroyed on the spot. Fix Your A.I. EA! (Just joking

Edit: Wow can't even explicitly make a joke without getting down-voted. I know it was a lame joke but still for being in the gaming part of the forum some people are a bit too serious. (Kinda glad I didn't go with "The Sims, enabling grown men to play with dolls in the privacy of their homes" that one would have gone pretty badly fast.)

Thank you, EA, but no. I was totally into Sims 1, loved Sims 2 to pieces, then started playing Sims 3 when it came out. For years I've worked off and on on building a TS3 world only to end up with problems every time an expansion pack was released because I could either update my game and play it OR keep my game and the world creation tool in working order, rarely ever both at the same time. Then there were the bugs, the incessant bugs that EA NEVER fixes so instead of spending time playing I'd be spending hours on end updating with player-made fixes in order to have a semi-working game. I had gone through similar with Sims 2, although not quite as badly, and I hadn't planned on attempting Sims 3 but decided to give it a shot. So currently I haven't played Sims 3 in over two years, still wouldn't mind getting back to finishing that world but can't quite convince myself to do it, and have two or three expansion packs sitting on a shelf I've never even installed.

EA appears to be made up of a bunch of money-grubbing execs that couldn't care less about delivering a reasonably working (never mind quality) product and don't have to because so many people will line up to buy anything with The Sims in the title it's ridiculous. As long as that cash cow can be milked I don't believe they give one hoot about the horrid mastitis infection said poor cow has.

EA can keep Sims 4 and I'll keep my money, thank you very much. There are much worthier causes for it than buying what will indubitably be yet another over-hyped bug-infested piece of garbage masquerading as a video game.

What expansions? If they're unopened, Id buy em if the price is right. o.o Seriously, though, people complain about the expansions and the bugs? You want it all at once, its gonna have bugsm. These arent just DLC, They're adding a large amount of content ti these games (most of the time) and developers want ti get paid for it- but, at the same time, the nly "necessart" ones are: base pets, collage, and pets. At $60-80USD for the three (if you buy the base & pets expansion for 40) so... yeah. Anyways, its a fun game, it aint for everyone, and I hate EA as much as the next guy- but Sims is generally good, ignoring the late expansions.

My first Sims game was picking up The Sims 3 for $10 at a Steam sale in December 2012. I'm not counting the 10 minutes of bizarre Sims 2 multiplayer on the GameCube where we had to race to seduce as many people as we could. Yes, that was actually the in-game goal.

I got hooked and it's now my most played game by three times any other game at around 950 hours. By December 2013, I had all the expansions (not the stuff packs) thanks to Steam sales and gifts.

I do love The Sims 3. It's a lot of fun, but there were enough subtle bugs that made the game annoying. I mention I've "played" 950 hours, but in reality a lot of that is waiting 20 or so minutes for a save file to load, only for it to potentially fail and I start again. I had a super Sim who was an immortal vampire that had maxed every available skill in the game, did pretty much everything and had so much data associated with her that she was the major cause of any save game slowdown. It was crazy.

Now that I've played a lot, this is where achievements come in. I still play Sims 3, and I use the achievements as goals I generally wouldn't have gone after on my own. I still haven't found the perfect opportunity to do this one yet:

Swan DiveAs a non-supernatural female, Make out with your Vampire partner, then break up and Make out with a new Werewolf partner, break up with them and marry a Vampire.

Sounds good, though I'd say the problem with the Sims 3 wasn't specifically enough advancement, being able to have concurrent and freely explorable world was a pretty big step. No instead it kind of removed the entire "management" aspect of the game, your Sims were just perpetually happy little automata that would go about anything you asked them with nary a hiccup, challenge, or etc. to stand in the way.

It was a game that literally played itself, and of course that's not something you want at all. And that's the one thing I'm wondering this time around. The advances in online stuff, the character creator, the house design stuff, the "emotions" for the gameplay themselves. That's all well and good and look to be, if not revolutionary, then at least a nice change on every front.

No what I'm looking for is if the "game" itself has gone back more towards one and two, where it actually felt like I had to be involved in my Sims lives at all or they'd become a self pissing terminally depressed mess. I can get maybe lifting it from that, but I still want to feel like I'm somehow how needed at all.

Sounds good, though I'd say the problem with the Sims 3 wasn't specifically enough advancement, being able to have concurrent and freely explorable world was a pretty big step. No instead it kind of removed the entire "management" aspect of the game, your Sims were just perpetually happy little automata that would go about anything you asked them with nary a hiccup, challenge, or etc. to stand in the way.

It was a game that literally played itself, and of course that's not something you want at all. And that's the one thing I'm wondering this time around. The advances in online stuff, the character creator, the house design stuff, the "emotions" for the gameplay themselves. That's all well and good and look to be, if not revolutionary, then at least a nice change on every front.

No what I'm looking for is if the "game" itself has gone back more towards one and two, where it actually felt like I had to be involved in my Sims lives at all or they'd become a self pissing terminally depressed mess. I can get maybe lifting it from that, but I still want to feel like I'm somehow how needed at all.

As others have touched on, EA has a tendency to release bug fixes as DLC. The Sims at first looks like a nice game, but looking back at the sheer amount of expansions, I seriously doubt EA is going to do anything other than fix bugs in future expansions, which will have something like 1 new feature really, and sell it as an expansion for $49 or more.

Also,, what's "new" about Sims 4? , traits have sliders and character looks is more customizable? is that really it?

What I want to know is if they bothered to better balance the in-game time yet. It's somewhat incredible that after 3 editions they never managed to fix the fundamental "it takes 3 hours to walk from my backyard to the 3rd story of my house" issue. This limitation always ruined the game for me, as it takes away the incentive to get rich and build a giant house- it takes your Sims so long to get around said house that you would have been better off in a small shack.

I hadn't heard of this, so I looked (very briefly) into it, and it looks like a completely different thing from The Sims; it looks more like Second Life. It *appears* to have one avatar directly controlled per player, as opposed to the semi-independent masses allowed by The Sims.

I'd prefer to play god over a tiny universe and keep all the other pantheons at bay.

(If I misunderstood OpenSim, I'd be interested in a better explanation.)

OpenSim is very similar to Second Life. People use the same client/viewers but the server'side is open source and free to use. There's also travel between people's instances (or grids). NPCs are part of it, but its up to the grid owner to set them up. Its hard to categorize, though. Its sort of like an MMO, but its also a type of social media while also being an unlimited sandbox. There's a lot going on with it, more than what can be described in a comments section. Perhaps Ars will do something in depth on OpenSim and its fork, WhiteCoreSim. (hint hint) :-)

And I also like the Sims, but my interest has faded since I began working with OpenSim. :-D Add EA's screw ups since trying to turn The Sims into an MMO and, well, there's just nothing there for me anymore.

What I want to know is if they bothered to better balance the in-game time yet. It's somewhat incredible that after 3 editions they never managed to fix the fundamental "it takes 3 hours to walk from my backyard to the 3rd story of my house" issue. This limitation always ruined the game for me, as it takes away the incentive to get rich and build a giant house- it takes your Sims so long to get around said house that you would have been better off in a small shack.

This is why I always got the teleporter lifetime wish as fast as I could. In one of the pre-built houses in Island Paradise that was really vertical, I ended up installing two teleporters just because I knew pathing on stairs is still a huge issue for Sims. If I sent a Sim to one of the sub worlds (future/uni/world adventures), I always made sure to pack the teleporter in the family inventory so I could temporarily install it in their home base.

It's dumb, but it solves moving around. Even better, you can use a Sim's cell phone to teleport back home once one's installed, so any time I had to go to another location, I would teleport the Sim home, and then teleport again from there.

Time is indeed a really big issue, but I don't know how they're going to solve it without slowing down the pace of the game. On one hand, a Sim waking up two hours before work/school is not going to have the time to eat and piss before the carpool shows up blaring the horn and interrupting the action queue. The teleporter solved that issue, allowing my Sims to prepare pretty much up until the last few minutes before work/school. University Life attempted to change things up a bit by making the go to class action automatically kick in 90 minutes before instead of 60, but they didn't adjust the automatic alarm time from two hours before the event. This meant that by the time your Sim rolled out of bed, the go to class action had kicked in and off your Sim went.

For anyone not aware, the time scale is 1 minute in The Sims 3 is equal to one second in real time.

As others have touched on, EA has a tendency to release bug fixes as DLC. The Sims at first looks like a nice game, but looking back at the sheer amount of expansions, I seriously doubt EA is going to do anything other than fix bugs in future expansions, which will have something like 1 new feature really, and sell it as an expansion for $49 or more.

Also,, what's "new" about Sims 4? , traits have sliders and character looks is more customizable? is that really it?

Those aren't the only things new. They also removed the CaSt tool, that handy-dandy gizmo that lets a player apply any texture to anything and change the color at a whim. From what I've read that's going over REAL big with players (as in lead balloon big). That tool was one of the best things about TS3.

Other players I know are fed up with paying hundreds of dollars for a game and expansion packs and finally get their game put together just to start over fresh. I didn't feel that way so much with TS2 because there was so many features added that weren't in the original game and its expansions but sure felt like that with TS3.

What I want to know is if they bothered to better balance the in-game time yet. It's somewhat incredible that after 3 editions they never managed to fix the fundamental "it takes 3 hours to walk from my backyard to the 3rd story of my house" issue. This limitation always ruined the game for me, as it takes away the incentive to get rich and build a giant house- it takes your Sims so long to get around said house that you would have been better off in a small shack.

This is why I always got the teleporter lifetime wish as fast as I could. In one of the pre-built houses in Island Paradise that was really vertical, I ended up installing two teleporters just because I knew pathing on stairs is still a huge issue for Sims. If I sent a Sim to one of the sub worlds (future/uni/world adventures), I always made sure to pack the teleporter in the family inventory so I could temporarily install it in their home base.

It's dumb, but it solves moving around. Even better, you can use a Sim's cell phone to teleport back home once one's installed, so any time I had to go to another location, I would teleport the Sim home, and then teleport again from there.

Time is indeed a really big issue, but I don't know how they're going to solve it without slowing down the pace of the game. On one hand, a Sim waking up two hours before work/school is not going to have the time to eat and piss before the carpool shows up blaring the horn and interrupting the action queue. The teleporter solved that issue, allowing my Sims to prepare pretty much up until the last few minutes before work/school. University Life attempted to change things up a bit by making the go to class action automatically kick in 90 minutes before instead of 60, but they didn't adjust the automatic alarm time from two hours before the event. This meant that by the time your Sim rolled out of bed, the go to class action had kicked in and off your Sim went.

For anyone not aware, the time scale is 1 minute in The Sims 3 is equal to one second in real time.

I was formerly a die-hard non-cheater but I got past a lot of that with TS3. I just had a mod that allowed some of the testing cheats, shift-clicked on a location and chose "teleport here". I enjoy the open neighborhood but it wasn't fun for me waiting on my Sim to get somewhere--might as well be waiting on a load screen.

What I want to know is if they bothered to better balance the in-game time yet. It's somewhat incredible that after 3 editions they never managed to fix the fundamental "it takes 3 hours to walk from my backyard to the 3rd story of my house" issue. This limitation always ruined the game for me, as it takes away the incentive to get rich and build a giant house- it takes your Sims so long to get around said house that you would have been better off in a small shack.

This is why I always got the teleporter lifetime wish as fast as I could. In one of the pre-built houses in Island Paradise that was really vertical, I ended up installing two teleporters just because I knew pathing on stairs is still a huge issue for Sims. If I sent a Sim to one of the sub worlds (future/uni/world adventures), I always made sure to pack the teleporter in the family inventory so I could temporarily install it in their home base.

It's dumb, but it solves moving around. Even better, you can use a Sim's cell phone to teleport back home once one's installed, so any time I had to go to another location, I would teleport the Sim home, and then teleport again from there.

Time is indeed a really big issue, but I don't know how they're going to solve it without slowing down the pace of the game. On one hand, a Sim waking up two hours before work/school is not going to have the time to eat and piss before the carpool shows up blaring the horn and interrupting the action queue. The teleporter solved that issue, allowing my Sims to prepare pretty much up until the last few minutes before work/school. University Life attempted to change things up a bit by making the go to class action automatically kick in 90 minutes before instead of 60, but they didn't adjust the automatic alarm time from two hours before the event. This meant that by the time your Sim rolled out of bed, the go to class action had kicked in and off your Sim went.

For anyone not aware, the time scale is 1 minute in The Sims 3 is equal to one second in real time.

I was formerly a die-hard non-cheater but I got past a lot of that with TS3. I just had a mod that allowed some of the testing cheats, shift-clicked on a location and chose "teleport here". I enjoy the open neighborhood but it wasn't fun for me waiting on my Sim to get somewhere--might as well be waiting on a load screen.

I like getting the achievements, so I don't cheat (although I did have the MasterController mod to allow some more fine-grained control over their lives) and this is why I go for the teleporter lifetime reward ASAP. I would say it's pretty much essential in some of the larger worlds. For the longest time, I played in Bridgeport and eventually moved my family into the hills to the west of the city. I think I picked the plot the furthest away from the city and the only plot further away was a park. Anyway, having a car with speed 10 helped a bit, but the school bus picking up the kids in the morning would take so long to get to school, the day would be half over before they got there. And coming back would take so long by bus that the kids would have no time to do homework, just time to eat, shower, and sleep. Solution: Teleport friggin everywhere.

I quite enjoyed Bridgeport, and the idea of apartments, but the apartments available were really small and any collection of stuff would force you either into the suburbs to the south of the city or if you were really rich, to the hills to the west of the city to be able to build a house, meaning your commute time to anything interesting just tripled since every non-residential plot was in the city. I really wish there had been things like penthouse apartments available.

What I want to know is if they bothered to better balance the in-game time yet. It's somewhat incredible that after 3 editions they never managed to fix the fundamental "it takes 3 hours to walk from my backyard to the 3rd story of my house" issue. This limitation always ruined the game for me, as it takes away the incentive to get rich and build a giant house- it takes your Sims so long to get around said house that you would have been better off in a small shack.

This is why I always got the teleporter lifetime wish as fast as I could. In one of the pre-built houses in Island Paradise that was really vertical, I ended up installing two teleporters just because I knew pathing on stairs is still a huge issue for Sims. If I sent a Sim to one of the sub worlds (future/uni/world adventures), I always made sure to pack the teleporter in the family inventory so I could temporarily install it in their home base.

It's dumb, but it solves moving around. Even better, you can use a Sim's cell phone to teleport back home once one's installed, so any time I had to go to another location, I would teleport the Sim home, and then teleport again from there.

Time is indeed a really big issue, but I don't know how they're going to solve it without slowing down the pace of the game. On one hand, a Sim waking up two hours before work/school is not going to have the time to eat and piss before the carpool shows up blaring the horn and interrupting the action queue. The teleporter solved that issue, allowing my Sims to prepare pretty much up until the last few minutes before work/school. University Life attempted to change things up a bit by making the go to class action automatically kick in 90 minutes before instead of 60, but they didn't adjust the automatic alarm time from two hours before the event. This meant that by the time your Sim rolled out of bed, the go to class action had kicked in and off your Sim went.

For anyone not aware, the time scale is 1 minute in The Sims 3 is equal to one second in real time.

I was formerly a die-hard non-cheater but I got past a lot of that with TS3. I just had a mod that allowed some of the testing cheats, shift-clicked on a location and chose "teleport here". I enjoy the open neighborhood but it wasn't fun for me waiting on my Sim to get somewhere--might as well be waiting on a load screen.

I like getting the achievements, so I don't cheat (although I did have the MasterController mod to allow some more fine-grained control over their lives) and this is why I go for the teleporter lifetime reward ASAP. I would say it's pretty much essential in some of the larger worlds. For the longest time, I played in Bridgeport and eventually moved my family into the hills to the west of the city. I think I picked the plot the furthest away from the city and the only plot further away was a park. Anyway, having a car with speed 10 helped a bit, but the school bus picking up the kids in the morning would take so long to get to school, the day would be half over before they got there. And coming back would take so long by bus that the kids would have no time to do homework, just time to eat, shower, and sleep. Solution: Teleport friggin everywhere.

I quite enjoyed Bridgeport, and the idea of apartments, but the apartments available were really small and any collection of stuff would force you either into the suburbs to the south of the city or if you were really rich, to the hills to the west of the city to be able to build a house, meaning your commute time to anything interesting just tripled since every non-residential plot was in the city. I really wish there had been things like penthouse apartments available.

The idea of apartments was great, the implementation not so much.

I love MasterController as it let me make the town and Sims into what I wanted them to be. The developers think a lot of things are funny. I think said developers never got past the tenth grade in mentality. One thing I found that really helped time-wise was Twallan's Relativity mod, whereby you can set how slowly (or quickly) time passes. I set it to take roughly twice as long for time to pass and it was nearly perfect. I like putting my Sims way out yonder and like you say, it's just not practical for them to get anywhere. Most of the time my Sims worked from home but sometimes I want or a Sim wants an actual job. As for schools, half the time I just delete the building and be done with them. The kids then have time to hang out in the parks or library and do fun stuff instead of spending their lives running back and forth. Sure, without a school they couldn't pick a personality trait but there's a mod for that and sometimes it can be fun just playing what you get.

I played Sims 1 for a little while, but basically got bored of it (It's all very well living a life of crime, except that it makes no actual difference to the gameplay - and so on. There was actually very little to do). I started to resent it, because it meant my sister was always hogging the PC for months.

Then I saw, on the shelf of my local games emporium, an add on pack (for Sims 2 I think) which added H&M clothes, and then another one for Ikea furniture. I experienced a moment of Lovecraftian terror at the very thought of people paying to have imaginary versions of bland clothes from boring shops added to a game, and since then have been firmly convinced that the series is foul effluvia from the rectum of Shub-Niggurath, an insult to the dignity of the human race that cannot possibly be compensated by a new character creation system with all the traits in the world.

(I suppose there's some mileage in the Ikea one - suspiciously cheap furniture arrives in a flatpack, leading to a harrowing seven hour sequence that ends with the household trepanning each other with an allen key.)